not all our best poets
first learn in their sufferings what afterwards they teach us in their
songs? At any rate, that is certainly the case with preachers and
pastors. As my own old minister once said to me in a conversation on
this very subject, 'Even God Himself cannot inspire an experience.' No.
For if He could He would surely have done so in the case of His own Son,
to Whom in the gift of the Holy Ghost He gave all that He could give and
all that His Son could receive. But an experience cannot in the very
nature of things be either bestowed on the one hand or received and
appropriated on the other. An experience in the unalterable nature of
the thing itself must be undergone. The Holy Ghost Himself after He has
been bestowed and received has to be experimented upon, and taken into
this and that need, trial, cross, and care of life. He is not sent to
spare us our experiences, but to carry us through them. And thus it is
(to keep for a moment in sight of the highest illustration we have of
this law of experience), thus it is, I say, that the apostle has it in
his Epistle to the Hebrews that though Christ Himself were a Son, yet
learned He obedience by the things that He suffered. And being by
experience made perfect He then went on to do such and such things for
us. Why, for instance, for one thing, why do you think was our Lord able
to speak with such extraordinary point, impressiveness, and assurance
about prayer; about the absolute necessity and certainty of secret,
importunate, persevering prayer having, sooner or later, in one shape or
other, and in the best possible shape, its answer? Why but because of
His own experience? Why but because His own closet, hilltop, all-night,
and up-before-the-day prayers had all been at last heard and better heard
than He had been able to ask? We can quite well read between the lines
in all our Lord's parables and in all the passages of His sermons about
prayer. The unmistakable traces of otherwise untold enterprises and
successes, agonies and victories of prayer, are to be seen in every such
sermon of His. And so, in like manner, in all that He says to His
disciples about the sweetness of submission, resignation, and
self-denial, as also about the nourishment for His soul that He got out
of every hard act of obedience,--and so on. There is running through all
our Lord's doctrinal and homiletical teaching that note of reality and of
certitude that can only come to